My concerns with ostensibly privacy-focused Firefox forks:<p>* Needing to constantly monitor whether the fork is being actively maintained, or if it's a vanity project which abruptly stops/slows down updates when its owner/principal contributors lose interest.<p>* Needing to constantly monitor if the fork is using the latest official Firefox builds to make sure that it's also getting the latest security updates.<p>* Not being readily able to see a complete humanly understandable (meaning not just comparing git versions) list of changes that the fork makes to the official build.<p>* Not knowing the reputation of the developers behind the fork.<p>In sum, I basically trust Mozilla more than I do $random_fork_developer, so I use the official build and carry out my own tweaks, but I am always on the look out for more tweaks, which is why I'd appreciate if lists of privacy tweaks custom builds do were more transparently shared.
To me, having worked with OSS for multiple decades, but only ever having dipped my toe into the dev waters, the amount of forks happening seems ridiculous.<p>(1) the 'subdivision of the estates' problem that primogeniture solved for inheritance is very well and alive in OSS. If you fork a project often enough most forks will have such a thin developer base, they wither.<p>(2) this then channels quite a bit of development into projects that will soon die, thus effectively depriving the surviving versions of dev hours.<p>(3) it's ridiculously complicated for non-technical people to keep up with what project formed from what and which fork is the most current/secure/convenient/otherquality of the bunch.<p>I am genuinely asking, with all this being known, why hasn't there been a bigger push towards modularity. This was the idea of Unix pipes, and i don't see why it is a bad idea 40+ years later.<p>Have a 'Gecko' module, have an 'UI' module, have a 'telemetry' module, ..... this would allow people to build Firefox 'flavors' instead of forking everything. Everyone would contribute to the same project/ecosystem, users can discover the big project, and immediately download 'vanilla', but also get info on whatever flavors there are and in what way they differ? What is the real problem here?<p>Edit: autocorrect-correction
I am a big fan of LibreWolf. Along with Ungoogled Chromium, these browsers feel a lot closer to what browsers <i>should</i> feel like.<p>One of my favorite features of LibreWolf is truly disabled autoplay. If a site wants to autoplay, you have to allow it first, no exceptions. This might sound petty, but in a world where it feels like you have no control over anything, this small return to feeling like I am allowed to decide what happens in my own damn browser is liberating.<p>Note that Librewolf doesn’t autoupdate, but you can get notifications when an update is available using an unofficial extension.<p><a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/librewolf-updater/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/librewolf-upd...</a><p>You can use a package manager to install and update it, too. Even on Windows; it’s available in Winget.
This saves a lot of time. I tried hardening Firefox and it took more than a day to get everything sorted. I added a few policies and about:config tweaks yet with each new release of Firefox some new stuff has to be disabled or tweaked for hardening purposes. I always wondered why Firefox doesn’t just do all this anyways and be more privacy-aware. Their data grab in recent years has gotten worse. Forks like LibreWolf are a godsend and I am glad it exists. My only issue with it is that it causes sites to have a CAPTCHA interstitial due to all the fingerprinting mitigations it does, and it doesn’t play nice with e-commerce since those sites do a lot of KYC and fraud prevention and flag browsers which are trying to blend in.
If I’m using Firefox with privacy badger, UBlock Origin, privacy possum, cookie and cache deleters, a URL tracker plug in, noscript, https enabled by default, a handful of others that are probably redundant on top of Firefox’s internal tracker protection, do I really stand to benefit from this fork?<p>In other words, is this truly necessary?
> Disable WebGL to avoid fingerprinting<p>I don't know if this is done by default, but this is dangerous to do. A disabled canvas is itself a fingerprint, and can be more unique than your original fingerprint [1]. Canvas randomizers can have the same issues if they are not done properly. From what I've heard, the best mitigation is Firefox's `resistFingerprinting` flag, since it uses the same methods as Tor browser<p>[1]: <a href="https://multilogin.com/how-canvas-fingerprint-blockers-make-you-easily-trackable/" rel="nofollow">https://multilogin.com/how-canvas-fingerprint-blockers-make-...</a>
Yeah....I'm not gonna trust a Firefox fork maintained by 1 dude, and if Firefox would ever disappear I don't expect any of these forks to pick up the slack. I'm not a fan of everything Mozilla does with the project but it's still better than the alternatives.
Related:<p><i>LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30720301" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30720301</a> - March 2022 (217 comments)<p><i>LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29106155" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29106155</a> - Nov 2021 (306 comments)<p><i>LibreWolf: A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26034774" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26034774</a> - Feb 2021 (1 comment)<p><i>LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23901130" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23901130</a> - July 2020 (5 comments)
So how does this rate in terms of what was discussed here?
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31891132" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31891132</a><p>It sure looks interesting but that article definitely burst some of my privacy bubbles...
I'm glad this project exists. I stopped keeping count of how many new privacy offending features and nagware Firefox keeps churning out these days.
I use it sometimes. Works quite well and has a nice icon.<p>I also sometimes use Mull on Android. Its nice that there's some variety these days, even if they're just config differences.<p>Choice is nice.
How can librewolf people "fork" Firefox which brave creators called "pita" ??<p>Guess they don't care about supporting privacy other than skimming off of work of google all the while lambasting their efforts of destroying the same privacy policies they believe they are protecting.<p>Eh, fuck'em